But it’s not that way at all. She’s frozen in amber, she’s perfection, and I am hopeless and real and messy, and I say and do the wrong thing, and even when I try to love him, to use my body on his body—it’s pathetic. That’s it. I am pathetic.
After a moment, my mom sighs and looks back at her computer screen. “And then here is young, perky Randolph Greenleaf. A medical doctor and he’s fifty-four years old, and he has a nice mustache and he’s never been married. What do you think the pitfalls are?”
“Gay? Misogynistic? Selfish? Crabby?”
“I’m thinking of clicking on him. Here we go!” she says. “Should I? Gosh, it’s surprisingly hard to pull the trigger on these guys.”
“Mom.”
“Millie, if you please.”
“Millie. Sorry. Are you going to go home to see Dad at Christmas?”
She doesn’t look at me, just scrolls through the computer screen. “I hadn’t planned on it.”
“Is he coming up here then?”
“No . . . haven’t heard anything about that.”
“You do know this is weird though, right?”
“Christmas isn’t that big a deal when you don’t have children at home,” she says. “You get over it real fast.”
Do you? Because I have never in my life gotten over anything real fast, and now I just want to crawl into a little ball and sleep through the holidays. Sleep until I know what I’m supposed to do next.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
MARNIE
I set out one Saturday morning with Fritzie and my mother to get a tree, which we find on a street corner in Greenpoint, and manage to drag home on the subway. Which is so crazy and ridiculous because three men have to help us get it both off and on the train because it’s so big (“We are soo not having a merry little Christmas!” says Fritzie), and then we carry it home and up the stairs, and my mother says she’ll be surprised if there’s even one needle on the thing by the time we get it indoors. But somehow there is, and also it fills up the whole living room, having actually grown in stature on the way home. Surely it wasn’t this big when we saw it on the street corner, bundled up and leaning against a box truck.
In past years, being an artist and all, Patrick has loved decorating the tree, but this year he doesn’t come out of his studio. I get the box of decorations from the attic, and my mother helps me string up the lights. As soon as she gets them on the tree, she announces that she can’t stay for the whole time because she’s got a date with Dr. Randolph Greenleaf, who turns out to possess not all the bad qualities I had predicted. Sure, he hates restaurants and loves karaoke bars—an odd combination for one man, I think, but maybe he’s as complicated as the rest of us—and my mother says it works because he’s actually kind of stuffy and boring until he starts belting out tunes in the bar, off-key but at full volume.
I’m not sure how I feel about my mother going out with Randolph Greenleaf, even if it is strictly platonic as she says. And even if it technically is none of my business. I think I would just as soon not know him, to tell you the truth. She tells me I’d like his joie de vivre, and I tell her that I’d like his joie de vivre lots better if it was being lavished on someone else’s married mother.
She laughs. “Your father would sooner cut off his arm than sing in a karaoke bar, and he would certainly never permit any friend or relation of his to do such a thing,” she says. “So this is sociologically interesting to me.”
“Sociology, huh?” I say.
“Perhaps it’s anthropology,” she answers. “I want to see how the natives of New York deal with old age approaching.”
In her research, she also has joined a yoga class two mornings a week, and to blend in better with her subjects of research, she has a new haircut that is all slanted and shorter on one side than the other. The hairdresser complimented the pink slash that Ariana had put in her hair. I honestly don’t know what to think anymore. This is my mom, the person who used to wear Christmassy light-up earrings and bulky holiday sweaters with reindeer on them and little white Keds with ankle socks with lace trimming. She had a pageboy haircut and Bermuda shorts.
She tells me to lighten up. “I’m shocked that you, of all people, are judging me,” she says. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I am not sleeping with Randolph Greenleaf. And I don’t intend to.”
Anyway, so my dad doesn’t come for Christmas, and my mother doesn’t go to Florida either. He calls me at work at least seven times in the weeks before Christmas to ask me if I think she’d come home if he sent her a ticket, and I have to tell him each time that she doesn’t want to. She’s not ready to go home yet.
“Are you needing her maybe too much?” he asks me, kind of hopefully. “Maybe let up on the needing just a little, so she’ll come back. She’s scared of snow. Maybe it’ll snow, and she’ll come back.”
I don’t tell him my mother has bought some snow boots. She’s ready.
“What are you going to do for Christmas?” I ask him.
“Oh, I’ll go to Natalie’s in the morning and watch her kids plow through their presents. And then I’ll probably go watch some golf. And I’ll call you and your mom.”
“That sounds nice, except for the golf,” I say. “At least you’ll be with Natalie and the children.”
“Yup,” he says. “Don’t pick on the golf channel. Golf on Christmas. Lots of fun there.”
It snows on Christmas Eve, which both my mom and Fritzie think is the most incredible thing to ever be orchestrated by the galaxy, and which both of them act like I somehow arranged.
“It’s like Christmas in a movie! Or in a book!” says Fritzie.
She and my mother go outside on the stoop and try to catch snowflakes on their tongues. Despite my heart feeling empty, I make hot chocolate as one is required to do on a snowy Christmas Eve, and we walk down the street, scuffing our feet in the snow and admiring the big fat flakes falling under the streetlights. I try to see this through the eyes of both Fritzie and my mom. Life can be difficult, but there are moments that are beyond anything you expected. Moments of almost piercing beauty. That’s what I’ve learned through the last years, isn’t it? Be grateful for the evening, and the snowfall, and the expressions on Fritzie’s face, for the warmth inside, and the tree. And send a thought to Patrick, who is fighting not only himself but also a dead woman. Maybe I should go in and challenge her to a duel. I think maybe I will look in the spell book for a potion that will banish her.
Fritzie, being crazy, naturally wants to walk backward down the middle of the street instead of forward, and she starts singing “Jingle Bells” at the top of her lungs, and then she wants to know if we can ring people’s doorbells and sing them Christmas carols when they answer, just like they do in movies. I say no, but my mother says, “Really, why not?”
We go to Lola’s house and sing to her and William Sullivan. It takes them forever to come to the door. We’ve nearly exhausted our repertoire, which only includes “Deck the Halls,” “Silent Night,” and “Jingle Bells.”
“Come in! Come in!” says Lola when she and William answer the door. They’re getting ready to head to Florida, she says. They always spend January and February where it’s warm.
“I don’t think carolers are supposed to come inside and bother people,” I say. “We just wanted to say Merry Christmas to you.”
“Oh, so sweet. And I’ll miss you while I’m gone,” she says. “Is everything okay?”
See? Such a small question—most people can sail right through answering a question like that. But there I am standing on her stoop trying to remember verse two of “Silent Night,” and I am with my mother who wants to cheat on my dad, and Patrick is holed up in his two-room prison with the ghost of Anneliese, and Fritzie is a lunatic and I love her, and all I want is to answer the question in some kind of positive, affirmative way. I would like to answer her that everything is great; really, I mean to do that, but the trouble is that my eyes fill with tears just then, without any war
ning. No one notices except Lola. My mother and William Sullivan are talking about their favorite Christmas carols, and Fritzie is picking off the berries on the wreath on their door and tossing them into the street.
“It’s going to be okay,” Lola says softly. “Come in. We’ll pretend I need to give you something. Which, now that I think of it, I actually do.”
And she takes me into her house, a house that used to be so lonely and sad until four years ago when she finally gave in and let herself fall in love with William Sullivan, a matchmaking project orchestrated by Blix and then completed by me.
“Listen, you,” she says and takes my hand. “I know it’s hard right now. Heavens, we’ve all gone through this kind of darkness, haven’t we? And we’ve come out of it. I trust in Blix’s predictions, honey, and she was firm on the point that you and Patrick belong together. Okay? Just remember that. She had something real. She knew what I needed, and she knew what you needed. So you’ve got to just hang tight.”
“Will you take me to Florida with you?” I ask her, only half kidding.
“Nope,” she says, “but what I will do is leave you my house key. Maybe at some point your mother would like to move over here. I think it’s going to be important for you and your Patrick to resume a real life. Moving back into the same bed could be a good start.”
“He won’t do it,” I say.
“I bet he will,” she says. “Don’t forget that I’ve seen that man make amazing changes in his life.”
“Well, not lately.”
“No, not lately. But let’s not give up on him, shall we? I’ve known Patrick for years, and if there’s anything I know for sure about him, it’s that he loves you very much. He feels safe with you.”
When I get back home and get Fritzie put to bed and my mother situated in front of her computer, I make cups of hot chocolate piled high with whipped cream, and I take them over to Patrick’s studio. I intend to say, “It’s Christmas Eve, let’s have sex!” or something equally jaunty and free.
But here’s the thing: I get to the studio door, and it takes me approximately fifty-four deep breaths and thirty-six self-talk reassurances before I can even bring myself to knock on the door. And why do I have to knock, anyway? That’s what my mind keeps demanding to know the answer to. Since when do two people who love each other find themselves having to tiptoe around?
When I finally do knock on the door, Patrick comes and opens it up. His face is drawn, but I can see the effort he’s making to arrange his expression into a smile. He invites me in, and we sit and sip our hot chocolate together on his futon. We are being so careful not to stray into the territory of bad feelings that it seems like we hardly know each other.
After I’ve been there for a few minutes, he gets up and goes into the other room and brings back a little box. He’s made me a wire necklace with a clear blue stone wrapped around and around in the wire. All I can think of when I look at it is that the poor sweet stone looks trapped by knots. My eyes fill up with tears, but I brush them aside quickly.
When I go to kiss him, it’s like kissing a stranger.
Neither one of us suggests having sex. I remember then that the spell book mentions that to get rid of a ghost, you need to put salt in the corners of every room. Maybe next time I’ll bring a sack of salt with me. Throw it around the whole damn place.
The next morning Fritzie gets up crazy early, as children all over the world are supposed to do, whether their caretakers are thrilled about it or not. I am so cheerful, I am in danger of going into Cheer Overload. Really, my cheeks actually hurt from so much fake holiday smiling.
My mother, who has made a career of creating life-enhancing Christmas holidays for children, pitches in by suggesting we play guessing games with Fritzie to keep her from insisting on opening her presents before Patrick rouses himself. I start a pot of coffee and put some cinnamon rolls and a breakfast casserole in the oven. By eight o’clock, when Fritzie can’t take it any longer, I let her zoom into his studio and jump on him. I can hear her screaming, “It’s Christmas, Patrick, it’s Christmas!”
By the time she drags him out to the living room, I’ve got Christmas music playing on the speakers, and I’ve set the table with some of Blix’s finest silver and some plates that have poinsettias painted on them. The house smells deliciously like cinnamon and butter.
If a stranger were to peek in the window and see us all there—our nodding, smiling faces, our twinkly lights, the stockings hanging on the mantel—they’d surely think we were a lovely family about to embark on a fabulous new year together.
But nothing is as it seems. And I worry that this might very well be my last Christmas with both Patrick and Fritzie—and my last Christmas having a child to dazzle—and I want to make this something Fritzie will talk about for the rest of her life.
She opens the presents that I bought for her from Patrick and me: a video game she wanted, and a box of art supplies, a light saber, and a giant stuffed sloth, which she says will be best friends with Mister Swoony. Tessa has sent her a big intriguing box that we’ve been wondering about all week.
Inside are two identical satiny dresses—one bright blue and one red, with lace and sashes and a sweetheart collar and covered buttons down the front.
I hold my breath as Fritzie lifts them out of the box and then puts them right back. “These can go right to the thrift shop,” she says.
“They’re very . . . girlish,” says my mother.
“Not the kind of girlish I am,” says Fritzie. Which is of course true. “I could make them into hats maybe.”
Tessa calls the house in the afternoon after we are all bleary-eyed and are contemplating naps, and Fritzie talks to her very politely and in monosyllables. It is chilling to listen to, actually, how disconnected Fritzie is from anything I can hear Tessa saying. After the call is over, she goes and sits on the couch and leans against my mother for a long time, and my mother puts her arm around her and offers to watch It’s a Wonderful Life with her. I have to take Mom into the kitchen and remind her that that’s a movie about a guy who wants to kill himself, and maybe it’s not the best for today, not for an eight-year-old. And not for a man who’s wrestling with his love for a dead woman either, I think to myself. Although Patrick has somehow been reabsorbed back into his studio and probably wouldn’t come out to watch anything anyway.
“Okay, then, Love Actually,” says my mother when she’s back in the living room, and so then I take her back to the kitchen and remind her of certain elements she might have overlooked in that film, too: for instance, the couple simulating sex in the highest-production porn movie ever and the unfaithful husband and the brother suffering from psychosis.
“You’re right, you’re right,” says my mom. “Why is it that all I remember is Hugh Grant dancing?”
This Christmas, I think, is really a big fat hoax after all. A stunning amount of work—and for what? Simply to hide the heartbreak that all four of us are feeling. I feel like I’ve been pushing it away so hard, and yet of course it’s sitting right there in the center of my head, like a flashing red light: THIS CHRISTMAS IS A DISASTER.
In the late afternoon, when all the Christmas requirements have been ticked off, and when I am spent and bedraggled from all the effort, I stomp over to the music player and turn off the holiday carols and put on the music I love—the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen. Marvin Gaye. Lady Gaga. The Supremes. My mother yells out that she wants some Frank Sinatra. We put it all on. And we turn up the volume as loudly as we can, and we turn down all the lights except for the bright-colored ones on the Christmas tree, and we dance and sing at the top of our lungs. Fritzie jumps on the couch because that’s what she loves more than anything. Bedford barks and runs back and forth. My mother does dances from her teenage years, which include the jerk, the twist, the boogaloo, and some other crazy stuff, like the mashed potato. I can do the Charleston and the Texas two-step. We all fail magnificently at doing the Floss.
; At one point my mother is twirling me around in a circle when I feel her move away, and when I turn back, Patrick has taken her place. He pulls me to him, and my head is against his chest. I hear his heart beating and feel his chest moving up and down, hear the bass of his voice as he sings along to Diana Ross’s “You Can’t Hurry Love,” which is about everything I don’t believe in. I think you have to hurry love because otherwise it can flit away so easily.
I’ve been holding myself together throughout this whole day, trying to make it festive for Fritzie and my mom, and now I’m so surprised to feel his body next to mine that I almost can’t breathe for a moment. I feel like I’m melting into the soft familiarity of him.
And I close my eyes and thank whoever or whatever is out there that makes things happen. Sometimes you need a Christmas miracle, and you can already tell it’s not going to come from the usual places, like candles and Christmas carols. Those all had their chance. Sometimes the Christmas miracle has to ride in on the notes of a Motown song and the Texas two-step. Dancing, I think, is almost always a good idea.
But then the song ends, and he lets me go, and when I see his eyes again, it’s as though he’s pulled himself away once more. But, hey, at least he tried.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
PATRICK
Eight o’clock in the morning the day after New Year’s, Patrick’s phone rings. The buzzing of his cell phone yanks him out of a sound sleep. He’d been up until three, pacing and making art. Maybe it was four. Wait. No. He remembers seeing the clock say 4:20 in its huge red numerals. He can’t remember all that well, frankly. Things are fuzzy and there might be mushrooms growing in his brain. Or maybe he painted mushrooms. He’ll have to look.
It’s Philip Pierpont. The double-edged sword that is Philip Pierpont.
This time it’s the annoyingly celebratory Philip Pierpont bellowing into the phone, “Patrick! Patrick, my friend! The story is out and it’s sensational. Could not have nailed this better! This is going to bring people in!” (Which does not make Patrick feel any better, for some reason. He doubts if he and Pierpont would agree on what a good story would be.)
A Happy Catastrophe Page 22